“All Is Lost”

If you saw “Margin Call,” writer-director J.C. Chandor’s feature debut, which explored the lead-up to the recent financial meltdown, you know that he is a filmmaker who can certainly handle dialogue. Plenty of big-name actors, including Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons and Stanley Tucci, were willing to take parts in an ensemble project that would go on to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The guy writes great parts, and the movie had dozens of characters, most of whom were decently fleshed out, and all of whom had a great deal to say.

That’s why Chandor’s second film, “All Is Lost,” is truly a departure. Where “Margin Call” was all talk, the new movie has virtually no dialogue at all. Where the first one had dozens of characters, “All Is Lost” has only one. And it isn’t fleshed out at all — which is actually the point. Robert Redford plays a sailor, the film’s only soul who is also the soul of the film. This is a beautiful portrayal of not just the human spirit, but what our meager species goes through just to keep drawing breath. It’s a movie that is the complete antithesis to the studio system, and yet it is involving and profound, providing a surprising, unexpected bookend to Redford’s illustrious career.

Q and A with Robert Redford

The actor spoke to U-T writer Anders Wright about his career and his new movie. Read the story here.

As the movie opens, there’s a voice-over from Redford. “All is lost,” we hear, followed by an apology. He is a man in despair, a man who feels he has failed in his life. And then we flash backward, but not very far. Redford is the only person on a sailboat in the middle of absolutely nowhere that runs into a container of sneakers that has slipped off one of those massive ships. The damage isn’t enough to sink the ship, but his electronics, including his radio, are destroyed by incoming saltwater, and though he’s able to patch the hole in the side of his vessel, the vagaries of the open ocean and its weather patterns eventually put him into desperate straits.

“All Is Lost” is a movie of one man’s attempt to stay alive amid disastrous circumstances, but it’s also about this person trying to stay alive as a person and as an individual. Redford, who has an Oscar on his mantle for directing “Ordinary People,” and who spent decades appearing in iconic films such as “The Sting,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Out of Africa” and “The Natural,” does some of the best work of his entire career here, and certainly the best work since he was eligible to collect Social Security. There are very few people who can create an experience that is both existential and spiritual and takes place at the very edge of life and death.

Much of that comes from the sparse nature of Chandor’s script. Redford’s character is called Our Man, and we don’t even learn that until the credits roll. We are given almost no information about him whatsoever, and while that could lead to what is little more than an exercise in filmmaking, Redford breathes so much life into this character that we understand why we’re not given more. We shouldn’t be. We don’t need or deserve it. This is just a person alone on a boat that is damaged. There’s no reason for him to talk about himself or to tell his story. Chandor allows Redford to create a living, breathing individual and then demands that his audience fill in the rest, and each of us will do so in our own individual way.

Sure, it’s slow, but so is life and mortality and the time that it takes each of us to reflect on both of those. “All Is Lost” is a movie that could be called experimental if it weren’t so well considered, thought through and stuffed full of lovely allegories that will be clear to anyone willing to take this journey with Chandor, Redford and Our Man. It is a journey fraught with peril, certainly, but so is life, and that makes it all the more satisfying.

Anders Wright writes about movies for U-T San Diego. Email him at anderswright@gmail.com